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This would be like asking the average corporate "software development manager" to actually look at the code/product developed by his reports. Except for early s
by icedchai 3y ago
This would be like asking the average corporate "software development manager" to actually look at the code/product developed by his reports. Except for early stage startups where the person is truly in a player/coach role, it rarely happens.
- outime 3y agoOr making developers run the app/website on average laptops/phones that users commonly use, rather than on the most expensive MacBooks/iPhones.
- skydhash 3y agoI have a 2011 mac mini I'm using as home server. It had Linux Mint for a time (this year) and it was snappy, except for browsing the web. Everything else work fine, even LibreOffice and playing videos. But load youtube and you can see the stuttering.
- TMWNN 3y agoMarissa Mayer, while at Google, kept using dialup at home so she would experience what someone without broadband sees.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoHow'd she go from that to messing up Yahoo?
- sandspar 3y agoAnother way to put it is how she became CEO of Yahoo at age 37.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoI think one can definitely progress to becoming CEO of a large company by 37 if they make a lot of right moves, which I'm guessing she did. But yeah, to go from being the kind of manager that walks the aisles to the kind that regressed a bunch of great products - it seems like something broke along the way.
- TimPC 3y agoI'm at a director level and I routinely look at code and even more frequently look at product in a late stage start-up.
- icedchai 3y agoThat's great! In many companies, that doesn't happen though. Regardless of size or stage, it may not be part of the culture.
- frutiger 3y ago> I'm at a director level Since every company seems to come up with their own job titles, it would be more useful if you described how large your organisation was compared to the entirety of the engineering organisation at your company.
- uxp100 3y agoI have absolutely had managers (and managers managers) contribute code. I think the typical team lead manager lite position was supposed to be like 20% of time on development and my managers manager who oversaw like 30 people contributed some when our team was behind. Probably didn’t read much code outside of what they contributed though. At one of the largest tech companies.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoThat's exactly what they should be doing though. Toyota calls it a "gemba walk" -- managers and even executives need to walk the factory floor and see problems with their own eyes, not through hearing reports. With software, the codebase is the gemba, not the office. Managers don't need to be writing code, but they should be reading it. Otherwise it's like a production manager who has never seen the inside of their own factory.
- aworks 3y agoNot quite the same thing but I subscribed to one of my team's code review email lists. I also cc'ed myself on bug reports. Mildly interesting but didn't really impact anything although I was always looking for signals in the noise. On the other hand, my boss had a de facto policy of visiting each remote office at least once a year and conducting one-on-one meetings face-to-face as much as possible. I found this useful for myself to understand the team/environment/product and good for building connections with people, especially when cultures are significantly different. It did result in my visiting Wuhan 16 times between 2012 and 2019, for better or worse.
- yndoendo 3y agoUser experience and observing how they interact with the end product of software development is the true version of walking the aisles. What to find improvements, just be the person that trains and teaches the administrator, the general user, the maintainers, and the installers. For example, I documented how to load an OS image for assembly. Watched them use the guide and saw they flipped through the document. Afterwards, I inserted an extra page of what shows up in the text stream and said, "sit and wait for ...." at that point they started flipping around.